Modern electric or electronic devices include many components that generate heat, including, but not limited to processors/controllers, signal processing devices, memory devices, communication/transceiver devices, power generation devices, and the like. Adequate thermal management of these components is critical to the successful operation of these systems and devices. When components generate a large amount of heat, the heat must be dissipated or transported quickly away from the heat source in order to prevent failure of the heat producing components.
In the past, thermal management of electronic components has included air-cooling systems and liquid-cooling systems. Regardless of the type of fluid used (e.g., air or liquid), it may be challenging to deliver the fluid to the heat source, e.g., the component generating large amounts of heat. For example, electronic devices, such as mobile devices or wearables, may include processors and/or integrated circuits within enclosures that make it difficult for a cooling fluid to reach the heat generating components.
To transfer the heat away from these difficult to access components, conventional solutions use plates made from highly thermally-conductive material, such as graphite or metal, that have been placed in thermal contact with the heat generating components such that the heat is carried away via conduction through the plate. However, the speed and efficiency of the heat transport in a solid plate is limited by the thermal resistance of the material.
Conventional solutions also use wicked heat pipes to transfer heat from a heated region (also referred to as an evaporator region) to a cooled region (also referred to as a condenser region). A traditional wicked heat pipe consists of a tube with a wick running along the interior surface of the tube. The tube is filled with a liquid that evaporates into a vapor at the evaporator region, which then flows toward the condenser region. The vapor condenses back into a liquid at the condenser region. The wick enables the condensed liquid to flow back to the evaporator region for the cycle to repeat.
However, there are many challenges with wicked or grooved structures in integrated vapor chambers or liquid cooled heat pipes on standard Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), for example. A few of these disadvantages with conventional wicked or grooved structures are summarized below:                Micro-grooved structures showed poor performance in gravity operations;        Lack of fluid crossover ability causes circulation challenges;        The wicks cause a thermal resistance inside the pipe itself;        Insertion of a wick structure (regardless of porosity and design) is a challenge and not a common practice for PCB manufacturers;        Insertable wick requires an additional copper restraint to hold it in place to allow for a cavity for vapor;        The inside of vapor chambers and heat pipes is usually coated in sintered metal, which creates problems. The basic problem is that the inside of both the vapor chamber and the heat pipe have very little surface area.        
Thermal dissipation is a key factor that limits the lumen output of traditional display devices. These display device technologies can be of a variety of types including: cathode ray tube displays (CRT), light-emitting diode displays (LED), electroluminescent displays (ELD), plasma display panels (PDP), liquid crystal displays (LCD), organic light-emitting diode displays (OLED), and other types of display technologies. LED bulbs, for example, are available that are as much as 80 percent more energy efficient than traditional incandescent lighting; but, the LED components and the driver electronics still create a considerable amount of excess heat. If this excess heat is not dissipated properly, the LED light quality and life expectancy decrease dramatically.
Heat sinks can solve thermal management problems for some low-lumen LED lamps. Lighting manufacturers have developed viable 40 W-equivalent and 60 W-equivalent LED retrofits for some lamps. However, thermal management becomes a challenge for high lumen lamps. For example, a heat sink alone will not cool a 75 W- or 100 W-equivalent lamp.
Display device consumers and their manufacturers demand these high brightness, high lumen light sources for state-of-the-art display devices. These on-going requirements for high lumen light elements have consumers and manufacturers looking for light source technologies that have good light quality, a long useful life, and a high lumen output. However, these requirements are challenging given the need to dissipate the excess heat generated by densely packed arrays of high lumen light elements in the constrained form factor of a display device. In order to reach the desired lumen values in a fixed form factor, active cooling may be required to dissipate the heat produced by the lighting components. Some conventional active cooling solutions, such as fans, don't have the same life expectancy as the lighting elements themselves. Other conventional active cooling systems fail to provide a viable active cooling solution for high-brightness lighting elements, while being inherently low in energy consumption, flexible enough to fit into a small form factor, and having an expected useful life equal to or greater than that of the lighting elements.